Installation

Installation of the 8600GT was anything but easy. Unfortunately the rear mounted cooler did cause clearance issues, not with the chipset however, but with the memory. Yes that is correct, a GPU has caused clearance issues with the system RAM. The reason? The large fins of the heatsink rested on top of my modules when the card was not all the way in the PCIE slot. Therefore to get the 8600GT to actually fit I was forced to move both my sticks to the 2nd and 4th slots instead of the usual 1st and 3rd.

When properly installed the cooler still rested slightly on the modules and only just above the chipset

Obviously this is going to be dependant on what motherboard you use but it's still something you should watch out for (for those interested, the motherboard I used was an Asus P5W-DH deluxe).

NB. Those with a keen eye may have spotted that I am using Thermalright High Rise coolers on my memory. To make sure that the height of the heatspreader wasn't causing the problem I tested a pair of Crucial 10th Anniversary modules as well, but the same problem occurred.